For an American audience there is the expectation that, as a diaspora artist from the Middle East, Ayad Alkadhi ’s work necessarily should express and clarify the issues of war, destruction, politics, and sectarianism, especially as relates to Iraq, his homeland. We ask him to tell his story, to interpret his own response to death and devastation, and the annihilation of nearly everything but his memories of home. We have his provocative response in Upside Down.

Upside Down belongs to Alkadhi’s 2008 series entitled "Hanging," in which the compositions, filled with calligraphy, depict figures hanging in mid-air that serve as visual metaphors for the uncertainty of everyday life in Iraq. There is little or no color in these powerful, macabre and uncomfortable images. As in much of his work, the artist juxtaposes strong draftsmanship, in the western sense, with his mastery of Arabic calligraphy, which makes for both dramatic fusion and visual tension. The words are not mere decoration but merge with and amplify his emotionally charged image of a pair of legs belonging to someone hung upside down. The text, by the 10th-century Iraqi-born poet Abu Firas al-Hamdani, was composed while the poet was imprisoned in Constantinople and much later was set to music and popularized in the mid-20th century. The verses, which are well-known even today, are written as if spoken by the prisoner to a dove that has landed near his window. They begin "O neighbor, if you could only feel what I feel…you who have yet to taste pain."